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THE YOUNGER SENECA
the natural life, in the woods, without fear; only under pressure from his son,
significantly named Tantalus, does he sadly resign himself to advancing and
greeting Atreus. The act closes with what may be one of the finest symbolic
spectacles in ancient drama, next to Aeschylus' tapestry-scene in the Agamemnon.
The exile, dirty, unkempt, and ragged (505—7, 524), stands grasping the sceptre
(532—3) and crowned with the royal diadem (531, 544), pressed on him by his
smiling brother. In full understanding of the true kingship, he has accepted the
false. This rich act is, further, the only one in the play that requires as many as
three speaking actors. Like the Attic tragedians, Seneca is economical with
speaking parts, and follows the Attic precedent in limiting their number to
three, with rare exceptions. 1
The third Ode (546—622) consists almost entirely of a series of general
reflections on fraternal piety, the terrors of imminent war, and the vicissitudes
of Fortune. Odes of this character occur at some point in most of the plays.
While their sentiments are blameless, and while they may often include impressive
descriptions by way of example, 2 one feels that they would be almost
equally appropriate anywhere — even outside a play altogether. Yet in this case
some such pause for the hearer's emotions may be justified, for he is nearing
the climax of horror. By a pattern that is discernible in most of Senecan tragedy,
the climate of evil has been established in the first, static, movement of the play
(here in Act I and Ode I); in the second, deliberative, movement (here Acts
II—III), choices have been made through which the evil has taken root in the
souls of the human actors; in the third and last, it will burst over the people and
the landscape like a firestorm. In Act IV a messenger describes to the Chorus
the things that Atreus has done within the palace — a palace which he first
describes at length, from its pompous and glittering front to its inmost courtyard,
where eternal darkness reigns and hellish beings walk. That description
is no mere verbal ornament; for the scene is both a just emblem of false kingship,
and an appropriately dark setting for Atreus' maniacal sacrifice of Thyestes'
sons, which is next described. Then follows the butchery of the bodies, then
the cookery, in atrocious detail. The Sun has meanwhile recoiled in his course,
and darkness has covered all — or is to be so imagined — throughout the act
(Thy. 637—8, cf. 776—8, 784—8. Whether or not the Thyestes was staged in
antiquity, a modern director might brilliantly exploit the opportunities which
the darkness presents — and the contrasting glare of torchlight in the banquetinghall
at 908). This darkness is taken up in the fourth Ode (789—884); and is
enlarged to the scale of the universe. The singers wonder whether it is a mere
1 The exceptions are Oed. 291—402 and jig. 981—1011, each of which episodes will be found to
require the presence of four speaking actors. A recent discussion of the Senecan 'three-actor rule' is
that of Zwierlein (1966) 46-^7.
2 Noteworthy in the present ode are the contrasting tableaux of the Storm and the Calm (577—95),
emblems respectively of the threat of war and of detente.
528
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